"Google said on Saturday that Chinese authorities have approved its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings, the last regulatory hurdle to a deal that would allow the world's No. 1 Internet search engine to develop its own line of smart phones." The main requirement from the Chinese government? Google needs to keep Android open and free for at least five years. I'm guessing that's the time Baidu needs to properly fork Android.

One of the reasons to look forward to Intel phones. There is a lot of geek hate for the x86 line, but Intel has been great at standardizing things and usually offering reference implementations (or at minimum, given Linux developers and such the information necessary to make implementations).

This wont cover quite everything of course, but just getting a fully documented processor, bus and GPU into a phone will be huge process. We should already thank Intel for USB, which is helping us with all phones already. It certainly wasn't cheap to develop, but Intel still pretty much gave their work away to anyone and everyone to integrate.